Thursday, February 12, 2009

the end

The moment of truth has arrived, the point three years ago I imagined to be: follow the link and you’ll find the official release of the game!

It’s named version 1.2, I’ve added many tweaks and enhancements since 1.1, and I corrected a lot of bugs. It is the first stable and balanced release, so now I’ll accept comments and reviews; prior to this I never considerated critics as “legitimate” because even versions 1.0 and 1.1 were, in my plans, not definitive (but in any case I respected all the critics and took some design decisions based on them).

I’m sure that there’s some bugs I couldn’t see, and, most important, I’m quite sure I can change the various game items to further tune the balance. However in order to do this I need some people to play, because all the bugs simply can’t be found unless a certain number of games are played. The same applies to game balance: I can play over and over but my vision is biased, I must gather the opinions of many people who have played many times to further change the game settings properly. In spite of this I consider this version stable and balanced as I said, and from now on all future releases are the be considered as patches.

I rewrote a lot of sections of the manual. In any case consider that English is not my mother tongue, so please forgive any mistake I've done, both in the manual and in the game.

At this point I must thank again David Eastman, all the people who patiently read the blog and tried the earlier versions sharing their thoughts. For those interested the complete source code is available also, take a look at quest3d community forum to read comments on the code. I'll post a thread also on www.wargamer.com forums, it will be easier for me to answer questions in the forum than on this blog.

Wow! Looks great! I was following this project a ways back, I wanted you to like post it on rapid fire or something cause I couldn't Download it from another source. To my sadness, my computer didn't have OpenGL so i couldn't play it very well, but this one im on does! Cause its new! CANNOT wait to play it!

Great game, I only have one problem...I keep losing elections! How can I win one? I thought i was doing great, I enacted a bunch of my funds until the Palestinian crisis required 0 to maintain the current situation, and i was friednly to my neighbours (though if I had won the election, I would have bombed a Lebanese nuclear facility)

I'm leaving this reply both in a new post and in the comments to the post "the end", and it applies to both Fubb and Skeptikon’s question: in order to win the elections you must look at one and only one parameter: the domestic public opinion. In order to be matematically sure that you'll be elected you must have at least 66% of the domestic public opinion on your side due to the rules explained at page 3 of the manual. Let’s briefly review these rules: the electoral model represented in the game assumes that 40% of the people will in any case vote for you, 40% always for the opposition, 5% vote randomly because they decide at the last moment; what you have to bring to your side is that remaining 15% of swing voters, the most precious one in every election.As you can see, you already know that 40% of the votes will be for you, and if you don’t want to count on that 5% of random votes you can only look at the swing voters. Since you win the elections if you have 50% + 1 of ballots it’s clear that you need to convince two thirds of the swing voters because that means adding another 10% of the electorate to you (two thirds of 15% is 10%).The domestic public opinion value represent exactly how many swing voters have come on your side, or how much of that 15% of undecided electorate you have convinced. If the domestic opinion value is 20% you have added only 3% to the total number of people that will vote for you. Why? Because the calculation is

20% of domestic public opinion --> it means one fifth of 15% --> the result is 3%

Therefore you can be sure that only 43% of the votes will be for you. What happens if ALL the random votes are for you? 43% + 5% --> 48% and you’ll lose the elections anyway.

Another example: if you have conquered 50% of the public opinion you’ll be sure of having only 47,5% of the votes at the elections because

50% of domestic public opinion --> it means one half of 15% --> the result is 7,5% to be added to 40% of votes that you’ll have for sure --> 47,5%

The stakes are the swing voters, the swing voters are 15% of the total, the domestic public opinion represents how many swing voters you have convinced to vote for you.

Now, how can you convince the swing voters? There’s many ways, your foreign policy decisions will greatly affect the domestic public opinion. Some policies are unpopular and they’ll make you lose consensus among the swing voters, other decisions will be appreciated and your support will rise. Take a look at the bar showing the forecast for the domestic public opinion in the next turn, it will show you how your current decision will affect your image among the voters.

To conclude: to fulfill the electoral promises is a very good way to gain support but it’s not sufficient! Fulfilling the electoral promises will only grant you a bonus between 10 and 20% of the swing voters. If you look at the calculations you’ll see that 20% of swing voters means adding 3% to the total. So let’s say the domestic public opinion hates you because of your policy during your mandate, and let’s say you have 0% of domestic public opinion on your side. Even if you fulfilled the electoral promises and even if the maximum bonus is applied you’ll only have 20% of swing voters decided to vote for you, and that means adding only 3% of votes, so the total will be 40% of votes you’ll always have + 3% from the swing voters you convinced + random quantity up to 5%and you’ll lose the elections.You always have to nourish the domestic public opinion throughout the game to maximise your chances of victory. Every turn you’ll have to weigh your different options because a certain decision might give you a short term rise in popularity, but maybe it will make you lose U.S. support which grants you money and therefore the possibility to pursue your policy.I hope to have clarified things a bit.

I would recommend that in future versions you leave the choice for theplayer. It was a hit in the balls for me to watch me get elected butnothing else happening.It also makes certain aspects of the game, well, pointless.

I'm always open to suggestions and critics.However consider that a game must have a precise beginning, a precise end, and precise means to achieve the game objectives. The game as it has been structured has a clear sense with one mandate, in order to support more mandates the game would need to be totally different. To make only one example out of the dozens possibile, just think about the inter-Arab wars: the player's neighbours might mutually destroy themselves, and the player might find himself alone without adversaries, really no fun; obviously this might be the explicit game objective i.e. the total destruction of the Arab countries surrounding Israel, but in my opinion such a game would be too shallow, while the political nuances give my game some kind of uniqueness.Obviously you might have expected a more open structure, but that was simply not my project!Exactly what aspects of the game do you judge pointless?

Well, I didn't say that the game must not end if the player has no adversaries.

In my game, the only conquered country was Iran afterall.

I just say that 15 turns are few.The original game doesn't have such restrictions (even though I haven't played it for a while). Only when your neighbours were destroyed (or the world by nukes) would it finish.

I recommend that you either let the player decide between 15 or ... turns, or just let the player have another term, If he wins.

Overall, the game looks fantastic for an indie project. Really catches the original idea. Apart from the above limitation, the ONLY thing I found a little annoying was that I couldn't minimize the game.

Can't tell you how long I've waited for the remake. Played this game when it first came out and still play it to this day. Excellent original and am really looking forward to playing your updated version. Thanks for all the hard work!

OMG this was one of my favourite games on Amiga and I was thrilled to see a remake.

Overall the game is fantastic, Thank You for putting in alot of effort in this.

I played it entire evening and even though I really like it I must agree with a previous poster that 15 turns are too short and I was very dissapointed when game ended after I won the election. I almost killed all other countries so another mandate period would have finished em off.